Editorial Policies and Ethics

Medical Academy Journal (MAJ) endorses the COPE Core Practices about editorship, authorship and peer-review. You can find many other useful guidelines at the COPE’ website. All manuscripts submitted to our Journal must comply in full to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals .

Plagiarism
Medical Academy Journal (MAJ) has a strict policy against plagiarism and uses anti-plagiarism software (iThenticate®) to check all submissions before peer review. Any sections of text/figures/tables taken from
previously published work (even that of the current authors) must be used with the permission of
the original copyright holder, and referenced appropriately. If you wish to use any figures/tables
that have been previously published elsewhere, you must obtain permission from the original
copyright holder. Please provide proof of permission when submitting your manuscript.

Authorship and Contributorship

Medical Academy Journal (MAJ)  endorses the ICMJE criteria for defining the roles of Authors and Contributors to justify authorship:

  • Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  • Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  • Final approval of the version to be published; AND
  • Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Non-Author Contributors
Those who do not meet all four criteria should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading.

Changes in authorship
If authors request removal or addition of an author after manuscript submission or during the peer-review process or at article acceptance, the journal editors should receive a letter clearly explaining the reason for the change. No changes to the Authors or Corresponding Author can be made after publication of the article, either as an “Advance Online Article” or in the regular issue. Instead, a corrigendum may be considered by the journal editor.
PAGEPress requires written confirmation from all authors that they agree with any proposed changes in authorship of already submitted manuscripts.

Medical Academy Journal (MAJ) is committed to a fair and transparent editorial and publication policy. We encourage our authors to register to ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, which provides a unique identifier for researchers, helping to correctly disambiguate and attribute each contribution to them.. Register online at orcid.org in advance of submission, or follow the prompts during submission. 

Ethical Approval / Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research
For research articles involving animal subjects, authors must adhere to the ARRIVE (Animals in Research: Reporting in Vivo Experiments) guidelines for reporting animal research (Kilkenny et al. 2010; Tilson and Schroeder 2013). For observational research studies, EHP strongly recommends that authors consult an appropriate version of the STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) guidelines. Before conducting a review, authors should consult appropriate guidelines, such as PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) and the EQUATOR network, for guidance on planning, executing, and reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and scoping reviews. Submitted protocols for systematic reviews must be registered in PROSPERO or another appropriate protocol database and comply with reporting requirements set out in the PRISMA-P Statement (Moher et al. 2015)

Conflict of interests. Editors, Reviewers and Authors are required to disclose any conflict of interest (that is financial or personal relationships or affiliations that could influence their work) and sources of financial and material support received.

Peer Review
All articles undergo single-blind peer review, which means that the author does not know the identity of the reviewer, but the reviewer knows the identity of the author: reviewers are asked to supply confidential comments and recommendations which will only be visible to the Editor and comments for the authors which are shared in an anonymous way.
Articles are evaluated for medical and scientific accuracy, clinical relevancy, and to ensure the paper is balanced, objective, and methodologically sound. In support of concerns raised in the GPP guidelines relating to publication bias, MAJ aims to publish results from all well-designed and balanced studies, whether they report positive, negative, confirmatory or inconclusive data, or data from halted trials; and whether they relate to an international and/or a country-specific
audience. We do not consider lack of interest or novelty to be in itself a reason for rejection.

Copyediting, Typesetting, Proofing, and Publication
Should your submission be accepted for publication following peer review and author
amendments, your submission will be copyedited and typeset by The Publisher.
You should receive typeset proofs for approval within the next 15 working days from acceptance of your article. Proofreading is the responsibility of the author. Corrections should be clear; standard correction marks should be used. Corrections that lead to a change in the page layout should be avoided. The author is entitled to formal corrections only (i.e., minor corrections and errors introduced during typesetting). Substantial changes in content are not allowed without the approval of the responsible editor. In such a case, please contact us before returning the proofs to the corrections team.

Publication
Articles are published online shortly after author’s approval of proofs and payment of publication fees, which are only due after acceptance of the manuscript. Upon acceptance authors receive an Article Processing Charge form and a Licence to Publish which will need to be signed and returned to the Publisher to proceed with the publication process. Articles are published in full-text
HTML and PDF versions.

Reprints and E-prints
Reprints can be ordered as soon as the author has approved the final proofs. Reprints can be ordered by contacting: laura.prosdocimi@ma-cro.it